The increasingly widespread use of wireless devices such as mobile telephones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) and the ubiquity of the Internet have fundamentally changed the landscape of communication services. This has led to various new challenges to provide functions such as secure service delivery, service notification and monitoring for enterprise communication services, particularly for services involving multimodal and multimedia communication.
One of the key problems in this area is how to deliver enterprise communication services to mobile users over a converged network with enhanced security and convenience. The term “converged network” in this context refers generally to a network capable of providing a common platform for a variety of distinct types of network-based communication, such as voice, data, messaging, etc. Prior approaches based on passwords and remote login have become inadequate, inconvenient and insecure, especially for mobile users.
By way of example, with regard to security, certain prior approaches may permit an authenticated user direct access to information content associated with the provision of enterprise communication services. If the authenticated user is a remote user located outside an enterprise firewall, a direct pipe is typically established through the firewall to connect the remote user to the enterprise communication services before any service can be established. These approaches therefore may provide an inadequate level of security. This lack of security is especially apparent in advanced enterprise communication services applications involving multimodal interaction and multimedia content.
In addition, mobile devices typically have very limited resources, whereas there is an increasingly strong demand for delivering active rich multimedia content through the wireless environment to the mobile user in order to enable enhanced CRM and other enterprise communication services.
A need therefore exists for improved techniques for secure service delivery, service monitoring and/or notification over converged networks for mobile users.